Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  It was a lot of money, more than I had ever seen, but I showed more restraint than the banker, giving no indication that I saw anything out of the ordinary. Mr. Schultz said he wanted to open a checking account for five thousand and put the balance in a safe deposit box. A moment later the banker’s old secretary was summoned in and in a fluster of attentions she and the banker went off to count the haul while Mr. Schultz sat back and lit a cigar fresh from the humidor on the banker’s desk.

  “Kid,” he said, “you notice how many tellers’ cages are open for business?”

  “One?”

  “Yeah. One teller with gray hair sitting there reading the paper. Lulu’s friends walk in they won’t even find a bank dick at the door. You know what this guy’s reserves must be? Holding a lot of dirt-farm mortgages? Spends his days foreclosing and selling off the county of Onondaga for ten cents on the dollar. I’m telling you. He’ll lay awake at night thinking of all that cash in my safe deposit box. What it represents. Give him a week, ten days. I will get a call.”

  “And you will go in on whatever it is,” Miss Drew said.

  “Goddamn right. You’re looking at the patron sweetheart of the boondocks.” He buttoned the jacket of his dark suit, and brushed imaginary dust off the sleeves. He put the cigar in his mouth and leaned over and pulled up his socks. “Get through here I could run for Congress.”

  “I would like to mention something on a different subject but not if you’re going to get all pouty and sulk,” Miss Drew said.

  “What. No. My words again?”

  “Protégé, like proto-jay.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said prodigy. That’s something else, like a child genius.” At this moment the banker returned all happy and hand-rubbing and put out some forms for Mr. Schultz to sign and took the cap off his fountain pen and slipped it on the end and handed the pen across the desk chattering all the meanwhile. But upon the scratching of the signature he went quiet and the documents were duly executed in a hush, as if a state treaty were coming into effect. Then the old lady secretary came in with her receipts and a book of blank checks and there was more fussing and heartiness, and in a few moments we were standing for the goodbyes and thank-yous and let-me-know-if-there’s-anything-I-can-dos, it is a fact that money exhilarates people, it puts them in hysterias of good cheer, they suddenly care about you and want the best for you. The banker had hardly taken notice of anyone but Mr. Schultz but now he said, “Hey, young fellow, what’s the younger generation reading these days?” as if it was really important to him. He turned the book up in my hand so he could read the title, I don’t know what he had expected, a French novel maybe, but he was genuinely surprised. “Well good for you, son,” he said. He gripped my shoulder and looking at my governess said, “My respects, Miss Drew, I’m a scoutmaster myself, we don’t really have to worry about the future of the country, do we, with youngsters like this?”

  He walked us to the front entrance, all our heels ringing on the marble floor, it was like a procession, with the single teller standing up in his cage as we passed. “Goodbye, bless you,” the banker said, waving at us from the steps.

  Lulu held the car door open and we settled into the back and after he took his seat up front, Mickey started the engine and put it in gear, and we drove off. Only then did Mr. Schultz say, “What the fuck was that all about?” and reach over Miss Drew to grab the Onondaga Hotel’s Holy Bible out of my hands.

  There was absolute silence in the car except for the flipping of pages. I stared out the window. We were going slowly downhill now along the nearly deserted main street. Here in the country they had things like feed stores. I was sitting in a new suit with long pants and my Elevator Shoes and my thigh touching the thigh of the beautiful Miss Drew right in the back seat of the luxurious personal car of the man who had existed for me only as an awesome dream a few weeks before and I couldn’t have been more unhappy. I rolled the window all the way down to let out the cigar smoke. There was no question in my mind that something unimaginably terrible was about to happen.

  “Hey Mickey,” Mr. Schultz said.

  Mickey the driver’s pale blue eyes appeared in the rearview mirror.

  “Stop at the church up the hill there where you see the spire,” Mr. Schultz said. He began to chuckle. “The one thing we didn’t think of,” he said. He put his hand on Miss Drew’s knee. “May I add my respects to the guy’s back there?”

  “Don’t look at me, boss,” she said, “I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Mr. Schultz leaned forward so he could see me on the other side of Miss Drew. He was smiling broadly, with enormous teeth, a very big mouth of them. “Is that right? This was your brainstorm?”

  I didn’t have the chance to explain. “You see,” he said to Miss Drew, “I know what words I’m talking about when I pick my words. The kid’s my fucking prodigy.”

  And that was how I came to be enrolled in the Sunday Bible study class of the Church of the Holy Spirit, in Onondaga New York the interminable summer of the year 1935. To undergo orations on the subject of the desert gangs, their troubles with the law, their hustles and scams, the ways they worked each other over, and the grandiose claims they made for themselves—that was my sacred fate in the church basement with sweat dripping from the stone walls and the snivels of summer colds dripping from the noses of my fellow students in their overalls or their faded flowered dresses, always a size too big, and their feet swinging under the benches, shoed or bare, every goddamn Sunday. For all I had accomplished and as far as I had come, I might just as well have been back in the orphans’ home.

  But Sunday was only the worst of the days, all week we went at it, there was nothing to do but good. We made visits to the hospital and brought magazines and candy to the wards. Wherever there was a store open with something to sell, as long as it wasn’t tractor parts, we went in and bought whatever it was selling. A mile out of town was a broken-down miniature golf course, I drove out there with Mickey and Lulu on several occasions and the three of us putted the ball through little wooden chutes and barrels and pipes and I got pretty good at it and took a few dollars from them but decided not to go out there anymore the day Lulu in a fit of bad sportsmanship broke his club over his knee. In town a small crowd of little hick kids collected whenever I set foot out of doors, they followed me down the street and I bought them candy and whirligigs and ice cream while Mr. Schultz was having receptions for their fathers and mothers under the auspices of the American Legion, or taking over the church socials, buying up all the homemade cakes and then throwing a party for everyone to come have cake and coffee. Of all of us, he was the one who seemed actually to enjoy these long boring days. Miss Drew found a stable with riding horses and she took Mr. Schultz out horseback riding every morning and I could see them from the sixth-floor corridor window trotting down the country roads to the fallow fields where she was giving him instruction. The post office delivered things she had ordered by phone from a fancy store in Boston, riding outfits for both of them with tweed coats with leather patches on the elbows and silk neck scarves and dark green felt hats with little feathers stuck in the brim and sleek soft leather boots and jodhpurs, those peculiar lavender pants that bloomed out at the hips, which was fine in her case since she tended in her long-waisted way to be a bit flat back there, but not really suited to the stolid build of Mr. Schultz, who appeared unathletic in them, to say the least, not that any of us, even Mr. Berman, wanted to bring this to his attention.

  The only time I enjoyed was the very early morning. I was always the first one up and I took to buying the Onondaga Signal from the news store so that I could read it with my breakfast at a little tea shop kind of luncheonette I had found down a side street. The woman there did her own baking and made very good breakfasts but I kept this intelligence to myself. I think I was the only one of us who read the Signal, it was undeniably dull with farm news and almanac wisdom and home canning advice and so on, but they carried The P
hantom comic strip and Abbie and Slats, and that gave me some small connection to real life. One morning the front page had a story about Mr. Schultz buying a local farm from the bank and giving it back to the family that had lost it. When I got back to the hotel there were more old cars parked with their wheels against the curb than usual, and sitting and hunkering all over the little lobby were men in overalls and women in housedresses. And from then on, there was a constant watch at the hotel, inside or outside, one or two farmers and farmers’ wives or as many as a dozen, depending on the time of day. I noticed about these people that when they were skinny they were very skinny and when they were fat they were very fat. Mr. Schultz was always courteous when he came through and would take a couple of them to a corner table in the hotel dining room as if it was his office, and listen to them for a few minutes and ask a few questions. I don’t know how many foreclosed mortgages he recovered, probably none, more likely he gave them the monthly payment money or a few dollars to keep the wolf from the door, as he put it. The way it worked, for the sake of their feelings, he would maintain a businesslike pretense, take their names and tell them to come back the next day, and then it would be Abbadabba Berman who issued the actual cash in a little brown envelope from his office room on the sixth floor. Mr. Schultz didn’t want to be lordish about it, he showed great tact that way.

  It was very mysterious to me how a countryside could be so beautiful and yet so invisibly in trouble. I wandered down to the river and across the bridge and out on the country roads every now and then, a little farther each time as I got used to it and discovered no harm would come to me from an empty sky, from hills of wildflowers, from the occasional appearance back from the road of a house and a barn and an animal or two standing around. It was clear here upstate that every city came to an end and an empty road began that required faith to travel. Encouraging were the evenly spaced telegraph poles with electricity wires dipping from pole to pole, I was happy to see also the painted white line going assiduously down the middle of the road over every little rise and fall of the land. I got used to the strawy smell of the fields and the occasional inexplicable whiff of dung coming up out of a roadside patch of heat, and what I first heard as silence turned out to be an air of natural sounds, winds and breezes, startled whirrs, slitherings through brush, pipey yelps, bugbuzz, clops, kerplunks, and croaks, none of which seemed to have any visible origin. So that it occurred to me as I made more of these excursions how you hear the life and smell it before you learn to see it, as if sight is the clumsiest of perceptions in the natural world. There was a lot to learn from the mysteriously unfolding landscape, it offered no intervening comfort between unadorned earth and a large and potent sky, so the last thing I would have expected of it was that it would suffer the same ordinary rat shames of tenements and slums. But I had by now taken to venturing off the paved roads and down this or that dirt lane and one day I was kicking along a wide rocky path when I heard an uncountrylike sound with an alarming breadth to it, and as I walked it became identifiable as a continuous rumble, like a motorized army, and I came over a rise to see a cloud of earthen dust rising from the distant fields and then saw in front of me, parked by the roadside, the black cars and trucks of the country poor, what must have been a good part of the population of Onondaga was walking out across the land in the plumes of dust made by a battery of tractors and harvest machines and trucks taking up acres and acres of potato plants, the machines pouring the potatoes down these moving belts into the truck beds, and the people following, bending down to cull the potatoes missed by the machines and putting them in burlap sacks they dragged along behind them, some even hurrying on all fours through the furrows in the urgency of destitution, men women and children, one or two of whom I recognized from Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Spirit.

  And now the scope of Mr. Schultz’s strategy became apparent to me. I had wondered how anyone could be fooled, because what he was doing was so obvious, but he wasn’t trying to fool anybody, he didn’t have to, it didn’t matter that these people knew he was a big-time New York gangster, nobody here had any love for New York anyway and what he did down there was his business if up here he showed his good faith, it didn’t even matter that they knew why he was doing what he was doing as long as he did it on a scale equal to his reputation. Of course he was obvious, but that’s what you had to be when the fix was in with the masses, everything had to be done large, like skywriting, so that it could be seen for miles around.

  He said at dinner in the hotel one night, “You know, Otto, I was paying the Chairman of the Board as much a week as all this is costing. There’s no middleman up here to jack up the price on you,” he said enjoying the thought. “Am I right, Otto? We’re dealing direct, eggs fresh from the farm.” He laughed, everything seemed to be going off in Onondaga just as he hoped it would.

  But I could tell Abbadabba Berman was feeling less sanguine. “Chairman of the Board” was the code name for Mr. Hines, the Tammany man. Until the Feds had messed things up Mr. Hines got cops who were too smart for their own good assigned to Staten Island and magistrates who didn’t understand their job retired from the bench and, for icing on the cake, bought the election of the gentlest and most peaceable district attorney in the history of the City of New York. It had been a wonderful way to do business. Here, the reality was that they were trying to extricate themselves from a grave situation. Also, the gang was out of its element, they lacked experience in legitimacy and could not be counted upon always to do what was right. And the other thing was Miss Drew. Mr. Berman had never been consulted about Miss Drew. There was no denying she was classing-up the act and thinking of things which her background had taught her, how to work charity, the forms it took, the dos and don’ts of it. And she seemed to be good at giving the Dutchman a little touch of style, so that it was harder for the people up here to think of him as without the shadow of a doubt a man of the rackets. But she was an X. In mathematics, Mr. Berman had told me, when you don’t know what something is worth, not even if it is plus or minus, you call it X. Instead of a number you assign a letter. Mr. Berman had no great regard for letters. He was looking at her now as with a dead pan Miss Drew picked at her salad with her right hand and with her left out of sight under the table touched Mr. Schultz’s privates which couldn’t have been more apparent because Mr. Schultz started up from his seat and knocked over his wine and coughing into his napkin and turning red told her as he started to laugh that she was a crazy fucking broad.

  Sitting at the far end of the dining room, in a corner by themselves, were Irving, Lulu, and Mickey the driver. They were not happy men. When Mr. Schultz cried out Lulu had not been looking in that direction and was so taken aback he rose to his feet and reached into his jacket staring around wildly before Irving put a hand on his arm. Miss Drew had split the gang, there was a hierarchy now, the four of us sat at one table each night and Lulu, Irving, and Mickey sat at another. Given the demands of life in Onondaga Mr. Schultz spent much of his time with Miss Drew and me but mostly Miss Drew, and I know I felt ill-used and muscled out so I could imagine how the men felt. Mr. Berman had to have understood all of this.

  Of course once the New York press got wind of what Dutch Schultz was doing here, our situation would change rapidly, like a fever breaking, but I couldn’t know that, everything seemed very weird and dizzying to me, as for instance that Miss Drew could be my mother and Mr. Schultz my father, a thought that came to me, no not even a thought worse than a thought, a feeling, when we attended a mass at the St. Barnabas Catholic Church one Sunday nice and early so I wouldn’t miss Protestant Sunday school at the Church of the Holy Spirit. And he took off his hat and she pulled a white lace shawl over her head and we sat all solemn and shining in our rear pew listening to the organ, an instrument I hate and detest, the way it blurs the ears with intimidating chordblasts of righteousness, or worms inside the ear canal with little pipey slynesses of piety, and that father in silken robes swinging a smokepot up there under a
poor painted plaster bleeding Christ on a golden cross, oh I tell you this was not my idea of the life of crime, but that there were things even worse than I knew, because afterward in this church at a table near the door Mr. Schultz lit a candle in a little glass for Bo Weinberg, saying what the hell, and then on the sidewalk the father came after us, I hadn’t thought priests on the pulpit in their colored silks saw who was in the audience, but they do, they see everything, and his name was Father Montaine, he spoke with an accent, he said he was hoppee to see us and shook my hand vigorously, and then he and Miss Lola Miss Drew spoke French, he was a French Canadian with a limited amount of wiry black hair which he combed sideways over his head so that he wouldn’t look bald, which of course he did. I felt dumb, thick-tongued, I was getting fat eating pancake breakfasts on the expense account and ham steak and applesauce dinners, I wore my fake glasses and went calling on churches and combed my hair and kept clean and neat in outfits Miss Lola Miss Drew had found for me, and that was another thing, she had taken to ordering clothes in my size from Boston, I was becoming a project of hers, as if she really was responsible for me, it was weird, when she turned her intense gaze in my direction I saw no depth of assignable character, she seemed incapable of distinguishing pretense from reality, or perhaps she was rich enough to think everything she pretended was true, but me, I didn’t know what it was to flat-out run anymore, I felt I was not reliably myself, I was smiling too much and talking like a sissy and I was reduced to devious practices, doing things I would never have imagined myself doing in my Shadows jacket, like eavesdropping, listening in to conversations like some cop on a wiretap just to try to get some intelligence of what was going on.